An epigraph from Soren Kierkegaard encapsulates the social and philosophic tenor of My Present Age: "But the present generation, wearied by its chimerical efforts, relapses into complete indolence." This is an age of fragmented families — the narrator's parents have retired to a mobile-home park near Brownsville, Texas. His estranged wife, Victoria, having walked out months ago, leaves Ed in a postlapsarian phase — something he wryly calls "that paradis perdu" when he feels a victim of "the Great Persecution" by an irascible old neighbor and the thudding banalities of the Beast of the radio hotline who continually berates the unemployed protagonist for sloth.

"We're all becoming what we really are," Ed contends, and offers us as evidence Sadler, "the ultimate Simplifier." Once a big-time campus radical urging Luddite atrocities on computer centers, and now a wild-eyed prophet for the Independent Pre-Millennial Church of God's First...